Make Everything Bigger With This FM8 White Noise Trick

Learn how to beef up your mix and especially your leads with this FM8 white noise trick. It’s really useful when your leads get lost in the mix.

One of the oldest tricks in the book, especially for dance music, is the white noise trick. It’s basically using ghost notes of noise (it doesn’t always have to be white noise) to make your leads stick out more. If you’ve ever been stuck trying to get your leads to pop out of the mix and you can’t figure it out with EQ and panning, this might be what you’re missing. Enter the FM8 white noise trick.

I like using FM8 for this for a few reasons. First, it’s really easy and quick to do. Second, I have a lot of control over the envelopes. You might be asking why I don’t just add in some noise to the lead sound that I am using in FM8 or Massive or any other synth for that matter. If you just add noise to the lead patch itself you lose control over it. It basically just washes over your sound. It doesn’t do anything for your mix.

The first thing I always do is duplicate the noise and pan hard left and hard right. I also add some reverb and then sidechain it. This will usually do the trick and open up my leads.